Secular

Choral score

$1.60 per copy (you are buying a digital license)

Note:

I’ve always been fascinated by ghosts. I’ve never seen proof, but when I was a kid, my sister and I heard one in our house. Our parents were away for the evening, and as we were falling asleep we heard disturbances in the basement, in the kitchen. It’s easy to be frightened by these sounds and unexplained events. But I love Ben Westlie’s notion that they’re envious of our existence. We have what they no longer have: physicality, warmth, happiness.

The piano is dry, with no pedal throughout most of the piece. The incessant rhythm is meant to be a little disturbing at first, but by the end of the piece we are used to it, it has become a part of the landscape. There are moments of optional TB divisi in the piece, but if you choose to sing unison throughout, please omit the lower notes.

- Timothy C. Takach, 2019

Text:

At night
you can hear them,
talking
about when
they were alive, when it was them
sleeping
in the room you now lie down in,
shut your eyes in,
to depart yourself for just a few hours.
Sometimes they sound angry
causing pipes to shout and floors
to creak and you
can’t help but hear
breathing which you tell yourself
is just air finding
the cracks in
the window frame. Why
shouldn’t they
display such bitterness, you’re the body, the
life, the memory, you get to still feel, you
have the time they envy. You hold
tighter to the warmth that is your shield.
You hope the furnace will
stop making footstep sounds
outside
your door,
silently call for sleep
to seduce you, but most of all you
try to be
very happy, if they
do enter your room, it is the very
heat your body
releases when
you feel joy that they glide into,
becoming undead.

- Ben Westlie
- Used with permission.